The Lady with the Gun Asks the Questions by Kerry Greenwood

$29.99 AUD

Category: Crime Fiction

The elegant Miss Phryne Fisher returns in this scintillating collection, which features four brand-new stories. The Honourable Phryne Fisher - she of the Lulu bob, Cupid's bow lips, diamante garters and pearl-handled pistol - is the 1920s' most elegant and irrepressible sleuth.Miss Phryne Fisher is up to her stunning green eyes in intriguing crime in each of these entertaining, fun and compulsively readable stories. With the ever-loyal Dot, the ingenious Mr Butler and all of Phryne's friends and household, the action is as fast as Phryne's wit and logic.   ...Show more

Sex, Lies and Question Time: The successes and struggles of women in Australia’s parliament by Kate Ellis

$32.99 AUD

Category: Current Affairs

In 2017, a survey showed zero per cent of young Australian women would consider entering politics. Zero. In a time when we critically need women in our parliament, and in a country that was an early leader in women's political participation, there is a perception that women and politics don’t mix. Shoc king incidents have exposed the sexism that women in politics face from opposition, the media, the public, even their own colleagues. And those headlines only tell half the story. In Sex, Lies and Question Time, Kate Ellis tells the sometimes enraging, often funny and incredibly honest full story of women in Australian politics today. As well as sharing the experiences of her own fifteen years in parliament, Kate has spoken to politicians from across Australia’s political spectrum, including former Prime Minister Julia Gillard, Julia Bishop, Penny Wong, Linda Burney, Sarah Hanson Young and Pauline Hanson. Kate explores issues like sexism, bullying, motherhood, appearances, social media, racism, the sisterhood and, of course, sex. Most of all this book is a powerful call for Australian women to inspire to political leadership, to shape a fairer Australia – where ‘women’s issues’ are everyone’s issues. Why would a woman want to go into politics? From where most women stand, Parliament looks like a toxic boys’ club. Here, Kate Ellis bursts the Canberra bubble to reveal what life is like for our female MPs, and why it’s the best and worst job in the world.   ...Show more

Emotional Female by Yumiko Kadota

$34.99 AUD

Category: Biographies

A passionate account of the toxic culture of bullying and overwork that junior doctors can experience in the workplace as part of their training. Yumiko Kadota was every Asian parent's dream: model student, top of her class in medical school and on track to becoming a surgeon. A self-confessed workah olic, she regularly put ‘knife before life’, knowing it was all going to be worth it because it would lead to her longed-for career. But if the punishing hours in surgery weren’t hard enough, she also faced challenges as a young female surgeon navigating a male-dominated specialty. She was regularly left to carry out complex procedures without senior surgeons’ oversight; she was called all sorts of things, from ‘emotional’ to ‘too confident’; and she was expected to work a relentless on-call roster – sometimes seventy hours a week or more – to prove herself. Eventually it was too much and Yumiko quit. Emotional Female is her account of what it was like to train in the Australian public hospital system, and what made her walk away. Yumiko Kadota is a voice for her generation when it comes to burnout and finding the resilience to rebuild after suffering a physical, emotional and existential breakdown. This is a brave, honest and unflinching work from a major new talent. ...Show more

My Year of Living Vulnerably by Rick Morton

$34.99 AUD

Category: Biographies

From Rick Morton, the author of the bestselling, critically acclaimed memoir One Hundred Years of Dirt comes a dazzlingly brilliant book about love, trauma and recovery, My Year of Living Vulnerably. 'Wonderfully readable and wide-ranging exploration of the visible and invisible touchstones of our liv es ... this is nourishing reading for our lonely, frightening and fraught times. Part self-help book, part treatise on the importance of love, kindness and forgiveness ... Morton is a national treasure and we need more like him.' Books+Publishing In early 2019, Rick Morton, author of acclaimed, bestselling memoir One Hundred Years of Dirt, was diagnosed with complex post-traumatic stress disorder - which, as he says, is just a fancy way of saying that one of the people who should have loved him the most during childhood didn't. So, over the course of twelve months, he went on a journey to rediscover love. To get better. Not cured, not fixed. Just, better. This is a book about his journey to betterness, his year of living vulnerably. It's a book about love. What love is, how we see it, what forms it takes, how we practice it in our lives, what it means to us, and how we really, really can't live without it, even if, like Rick for many years, we think we can. As he says: 'People think they want cars - and they do, to get to jobs and appointments in cities and regions where public transport has failed them. But what gets them into those cars, out of the house, out of bed for God's sake, is love.' 'Read this investigation because it will remind you of how optimism and love work together. Read it because your heart has been broken somewhere along the line and you need to know how to mend. Read this book because Rick Morton is the bloke we all need in our life to show us it is going to be okay.' Readings 'Wryly comic, hard-thought and deeply-felt ... It is a heartbreaking book, but a beguiling and necessary one. And a work far wiser than the modesty of its author would allow.' The Saturday Paper ...Show more

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

$32.99 AUD

Category: Fiction

Klara and the Sun is the first novel by Kazuo Ishiguro since he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature 2017.From the bestselling and Booker Prize winning author of Never Let Me Go and The Remains of the Day, a stunning new novel - his first since winning the Nobel Prize in Literature - that asks, wha t does it mean to love?This is the story of Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, who, from her place in the store, watches carefully the behaviour of those who come in to browse, and of those who pass in the street outside. She remains hopeful a customer will soon choose her, but when the possibility emerges that her circumstances may change for ever, Klara is warned not to invest too much in the promises of humans.A thrilling feat of world-building, a novel of exquisite tenderness and impeccable restraint, Klara and the Sun is a magnificent achievement, and an international literary event. ...Show more

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo

$19.99 AUD

Category: Fiction

Teeming with energy, humour and heart, a love song to black Britain told by twelve very different people. Grace is a Victorian orphan dreaming of the mysterious African father she will never meet. Winsome is a young Windrush bride, recently arrived from Barbados. Amma is the fierce queen of her 1980s squatters' palace. Morgan, who used to be Megan, is blowing up on social media, the newest activist-influencer on the block. Twelve very different people, mostly black and female, more than a hundred years of change, and one sweeping, vibrant, glorious portrait of contemporary Britain. Bernardine Evaristo presents a gloriously new kind of history for this old country- ever-dynamic, ever-expanding and utterly irresistible. ...Show more

The Animals In That Country by Laura Jean McKay

$29.99 AUD

Category: Fiction

Out on the road, no one speaks, everything talks. Hard-drinking, foul-mouthed, and allergic to bullshit, Jean is not your usual grandma. She's never been good at getting on with other humans, apart from her beloved granddaughter, Kimberly. Instead, she surrounds herself with animals, working as a guide in an outback wildlife park. And although Jean talks to all her charges, she has a particular soft spot for a young dingo called Sue. As disturbing news arrives of a pandemic sweeping the country, Jean realises this is no ordinary flu - its chief symptom is that its victims begin to understand the language of animals - first mammals, then birds and insects, too. Bold, exhilarating, and wholly original, The Animals In That Country asks what would happen, for better or worse, if we finally understood what animals were saying.   ...Show more

Turns Out, I'm Fine by Judith Lucy

$27.99 AUD

$32.99 (15% off)

Category: Biographies

Judith Lucy was just Great! Sure, the last remaining member of her immediate family had died, she was menopausal, she suspected her career was in the shitter and it seemed like the world was going to hell in a handbasket – but she was about to move in with the love of her life! Everything would wo rk out because SHE HAD A MAN. Then, in the space of twenty-four hours, her relationship came apart and so did she. A broken heart became the catalyst for a complete existential melt down. She was nearly fifty, suddenly alone and unsure about every aspect of her life. How had this happened? Should she blame one of her four parents? What part had the comedy world played and was her disastrous history with men about more than just bad taste? In her most candid and insightful book yet, Judith figures out what went wrong and then turns her attention to finding out what her life might look like if it went right. She tries everything from dating a tree to getting a portrait of her vulva done to swimming with a whale shark. Thanks to a series of revelations and a slight drowning experience, Judith slowly starts to realise that her life is still full of possibilities and despite death, heartache and a dry vagina. It turns out … she’s fine. ...Show more

The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams

$19.99 AUD

Category: Fiction

In 1901, the word bondmaid was discovered missing from the Oxford English Dictionary. This is the story of the girl who stole it. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, Esme spends her childhood in the Scriptorium, a garden shed in Oxford where her father and a team of lexicographers are gathering words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Esme's place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day, she sees a slip containing the word bondmaid flutter to the floor unclaimed. Esme begins to collect other words from the Scriptorium that are misplaced, discarded or have been neglected by the dictionary men. Over time, Esme realises that some words are considered more important than others - that words and meanings relating to women's experiences often go unrecorded. She begins to collect words for another dictionary: The Dictionary of Lost Words. Set when the women's suffrage movement was at its height and the Great War loomed, The Dictionary of Lost Words reveals a lost narrative, hidden between the lines of a history written by men.   ...Show more

Win by Harlan Coben

$32.99 AUD

Category: Crime Fiction

From the #1 bestselling author and creator of the hit Netflix series The Stranger comes a riveting new thriller, starring the new hero Windsor Horne Lockwood III - or Win, as he is known to his (few) friends  Over twenty years ago, heiress Patricia Lockwood was abducted during a robbery of her family's estate, then locked inside an isolated cabin for months. Patricia escaped, but so did her captors, and the items stolen from her family were never recovered. Until now. On New York's Upper West Side, a recluse is found murdered in his penthouse apartment, alongside two objects of note: a stolen Vermeer painting and a leather suitcase bearing the initials WHL3. For the first time in years, the authorities have a lead not only on Patricia's kidnapping but also on another FBI cold case - with the suitcase and painting both pointing them towards one man. Windsor Horne Lockwood III - or Win as his few friends call him - doesn't know how his suitcase and his family's stolen painting ended up in this dead man's apartment. But he's interested - especially when the FBI tell him that the man who kidnapped his cousin was also behind an act of domestic terrorism, and that he may still be at large. The two cases have baffled the FBI for decades. But Win has three things the FBI does not: a personal connection to the case, a large fortune, and his own unique brand of justice ...   ...Show more

Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart

$32.99 AUD

Category: Fiction

Booker Prize Winner 2020. It is 1981. Glasgow is dying and good families must grift to survive. Agnes Bain has always expected more from life. She dreams of greater things: a house with its own front door and a life bought and paid for outright (like her perfect, but false, teeth). But Agnes is abando ned by her philandering husband, and soon she and her three children find themselves trapped in a decimated mining town. As she descends deeper into drink, the children try their best to save her, yet one by one they must abandon her to save themselves. It is her son Shuggie who holds out hope the longest. Shuggie is different. Fastidious and fussy, he shares his mother's sense of snobbish propriety. The miners' children pick on him and adults condemn him as no' right. But Shuggie believes that if he tries his hardest, he can be normal like the other boys and help his mother escape this hopeless place. Douglas Stuart's Shuggie Bain lays bare the ruthlessness of poverty, the limits of love, and the hollowness of pride. A counterpart to the privileged Thatcher-era London of Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty, it also recalls the work of Édouard Louis, Frank McCourt, and Hanya Yanagihara. It is a blistering debut by a brilliant novelist with a powerful and important story to tell.     ...Show more

A Gambling Man (#2 Aloysius Archer) by David Baldacci

$32.99 AUD

Category: Crime Fiction | Series: Aloysius Archer Ser.

Evoking the golden age of crime and for fans of Raymond Chandler and Agatha Christie, comes A Gambling Man from one of the world's bestselling thriller writers, David Baldacci. A lucky roll of the dice. It is nearly 1950 and Aloysius Archer is on his way to Bay Town, California to take up a post with re nowned gumshoe, Willie Dash. Making an overnight stop in Reno he gets lucky at the casino, meets a talented actor named Liberty Callahan with her sights set on Hollywood, and helps out a man threatened by mobsters for a bad debt. With a magnificent Delahaye motor as his repayment, Archer goes west with Liberty to seek work, fame and fortune. The journey is dangerous and full of surprises as Liberty shows her steel and reveals she has a past as dark as Archer's. A risk worth taking In Bay Town, Willie Dash is tasked with finding out who is doing everything in their power to prevent his client, politician Douglas Kemper, from being mayor. As Archer and Dash dig deeper, they discover a town full of secrets and strange events. When two seemingly unrelated murders occur at Midnight Moods, a local burlesque club owned by local scion, Sawyer Armstrong, Archer and Dash must dig deep to find a connection between the killings. All bets are off To prove himself in his first case as a PI, Archer will need all of his skills to decipher the truth from the lies, the good from the evil and the relevance of the mysterious happenings offshore he saw during a late night boat ride in the Pacific. While Liberty, in a final perilous showdown, shows that she's a true star in the making.   ...Show more